It was a tricky question, so I thought about it for a second before saying something to the effect of, "If I were accepted into Penn, I'd like to join its chapter of Amnesty International, fight injustice and save the world." In that order. Now, to my credit, I was only 16 at the time and not entirely aware that it was the interview. I suppose our admissions officers get special training on how not to laugh in the faces of their interviewees. Mine just smiled politely.
So far, I haven't been able to check any of those things off my list. Like just about everyone else, I've changed my mind a couple of times about what I'd like to do after graduation. But a shift to a somewhat less idealistic career doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of accomplishing those last two goals.
I came to this conclusion after attending a talk at Penn's Law School last Thursday. Brandt Goldstein was there for the same reason anyone comes here: to promote his book. However, his ulterior motives (and his book) turned out to be a lot more altruistic than I had expected.
Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President -- and Won is the story of, well, exactly that. In the early 1990s, the United States government was indefinitely detaining about 300 Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And when I say government, I mean both the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration. The book focuses on the story of a single refugee referred to by the pseudonym Yvonne Pascal.
What made these refugees different from the tens of thousands of Haitians either granted or denied political asylum? They were infected with HIV. This occurred during the middle of the AIDS scare, when those infected were often as feared as terrorists today. As the title suggests, the law students were able to prove that the refugees had constitutional rights and got them out of Guantanamo. Because they could not practice law just yet, they convinced a law professor to take on the case and put countless hours into preparing the briefs and arguments.
Before he started his talk, Goldstein looked around the room and said that he wanted to show the students that there was no limit to what they could achieve if they dedicated themselves to fighting an injustice.
By sharing his book's story with current Penn law students and others around the country, he hoped that they would take on more public-service projects, if not professionally, then at least during their time at law school.
In the past few years, less than "6 to 10 percent" of Penn's law school graduates have gone into public interest law. They're lumped into the same category as those who go into government, so it's impossible to know the exact figures. What happens at law school is probably the same thing that happens to undergrads. Many students enter school with high hopes of, say, saving the world but lose sight of that along the way. Maybe their interests change, or maybe the pressure of student loans starts to get to them.
Like Goldstein, I'm not condemning anyone for needing to make good money after finishing school. I don't consider it "selling out" so much as a perfectly reasonable thing to do for the aforementioned reasons. In the meantime though, there's still a lot of good we can achieve. As stressful as college life can be, during these years we have more free time and fewer responsibilities than we probably will ever have for the rest of our lives. We can use the advantages we have to help others.
Of course, undergraduates aren't really ready to sue the president or anything. Hell, we need help to sue the owner of Smokes'. I know too many people who, like me, came to Penn intending to get involved with a group and help change the world, as trite as that sounds. Perhaps they even started going to the meetings, but then something always came up. Class, work, the sophomore slump, organic chemistry lab, another student organization, you name it.
But there's still time. Tonight, I'm going to my very first Penn Amnesty International meeting at Civic House at 8. Because, as Brandt Goldstein said, "There are a thousand Guantanamo Bays and a million Yvonne Pascals out there."
Amara Rockar is a junior political science major from St. Louis. Out of Range appears on Tuesdays.
